Bob Tedeschi’s NY Times e-commerce column today discusses a number of companies, NearbyNow, GPShopper, Krillion, ShopLocal and StepUp seeking to make the online-offline shopping connection. The article’s hook is wireless shopping tools from NearbyNow and GPShopper.
All these companies, and others, to varying degrees are trying to bring offline inventory information into online databases to meet consumer demand for information about “Where can I buy it today?” Indeed, there are two principal areas of growth for online shopping: social and local/offline. There’s ultimately much more demand for locating goods in physical stores in-market than there is for e-commerce, which will continue to grow but flatten.
Read the rest of this post at SEL.
Screenwerk 
March 6, 2007 at 2:59 am
Hi, Greg–
I read the NYTimes article as well and was glad to see coverage of the nascent local/offline market especially since mobile internet browsing will become ever-more mainstream in the next 3-6 years (wireless phone plans for data and handsets should significantly improve in price over the next 18 months).
However, I only wish Bob Tedeschi had known about LBDS (in full disclosure, it’s the company I founded). In many ways, we’re quite a bit ahead of NearbyNow in bringing the personalization of online shopping to local shopping in malls. We enable shoppers to search for products and sales and locate stores in malls right from the common cell phone via text messaging (www.l-bds.com), so we’re completely mobile via a device that’s already familiar to the shopper, and we’re specific to location of the shopper. Not only that, but the information management is distributed to each retail store in the mall, so the information is very specific, accurate, and up-to-date.
Anyway, it’s an exciting time to watch the efficiencies of the internet become more available to us all on a local, immediate level.
TW